Parents under investigation

In the last month I happened to be quite surprised at the statements of some parents, who came to interview for very different difficulties in relations with their children.

In the first case it was the school problem of a thirteen-year-old boy, who in recent weeks has no longer been able to go to school and has manifested evident anxiety (complete with physical symptoms such as tachycardia, sweating, dizziness, tremor ...) whenever mum and dad tried to convince him to at least follow online teaching. In the second case, the parents of a boy of about sixteen expressed their grave concern for some "transgressive" and unregulated behavior of their son.
The real protagonists of these stories seemed to be in both situations the same parents with their anxieties, while the two boys always slipped into the background.

And the heart of the difficulty of these adults was the frantic search for the culprit and therefore for an immediate practical solution.
Everyone admitted that they had oscillated between the desire for an angry outburst against their children and the temptation to lash out strongly against the outside world (teachers and "bad company"). From the idea of ​​dictating the law and punishing in an authoritarian way (extreme paternal role) to the idea of ​​unconditionally defending the behavior of children seen as innocent victims (extreme maternal role).
From an excessive distance that makes it unsuitable for understanding to an excessive approach that prevents you from grasping the objective reality of the situation.

On the contrary, it would take the right distance to begin to understand what is happening. Also because what usually emerges is - like in an iceberg - only the most evident and superficial part, but underneath lies a more complex and difficult to understand part.
So I try to propose a space for common reflection to look together where we can place this right distance. Reaction? "Not now, there is no rush, fortunately (un) luck the lockdown has arrived in the meantime, with the return of our region to the" red zone "... !!".

The forced closure of schools on the one hand and the tightening of the distancing rules on the other, in fact, have at the moment removed the urgency and dissolved the tension in the two families: the parents felt relieved of any responsibility and direct personal commitment towards their children, as the latter are now "justified" ("anyway no one can go to school now ..") or "protected" ("thank goodness you can't go out anymore ...") . As if to say that it was the pandemic that unexpectedly offered these people a quick way out of an annoying stalemate (confirming the proverb that not all evils come to harm?).

Thus the alarm and concern have returned to everyone's relief and the effort of getting to the bottom of real issues can be postponed to an unspecified future. It goes without saying that all this will prove unproductive and frustrating over time: avoiding problems is in fact like taking an impractical shortcut. As soon as you leave the red zone, the nodes will come back to roost, that is, the problems will recur promptly and probably more serious than before. Just putting it off is useless, you know, but now the temptation to "not think about it" is really much stronger than any good intention.

That the French director and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky was right when he stated that «solving our problems implies solving the relationship with ourselves and with our past. We are tied to our difficulties. So don't be surprised if someone previews and works out how to sabotage themselves: in reality they don't really want to cure themselves ... People want to stop suffering, that's true, but they're not willing to pay the price, to change ... "?

(A. Jodorowsky, Psychomagic, Feltrinelli)

Gabriella del Pero
NP April 2021